i don’t care about who started climate change

I realized the other day that the discussion about how humans are causing climate change sometimes does more harm than good. This is because when discussions about climate change include expressions like ‘man-made’, it opens up an additional front for debate about the cause. The challenge has now moved from discussion about one thing – what to do about climate change – to a discussion about two things – what to do about climate change and whether collective human behavior is the cause of climate change. This strikes me as a distraction from determining what to do about climate change because it invites people to waste time, money, and energy worrying about ‘who started it’ instead of keeping a singular focus on what we will do about it.

Let’s try to think clearly about this for a moment, reader. One way to think about climate change is that it is a small but permanent change in how we will all experience weather in the future. It seems to me like the general consensus is that the weather will simply get worse for most of us in the future – more rain, more snow, more temperature variation, more wild storms, and so on – and all this will be because of climate change. When the weather is bad today, what do we do? We simply try to respond in the best way we can. If it rains, we grab umbrellas or head inside. If it snows, we put on mittens and start drinking wine at eleven AM rev up the snowblowers.

The point is, when bad weather happens we don’t worry about the cause – we worry about the effect. This is where the way we think about climate change seems to diverge from the way we think about bad weather. The thinking about climate change has bizarre elements of defensiveness and self-righteousness built into it – some seem to deny climate change is happening in order to justify continuing climate changing behaviors while others pat themselves on the back for doing irrelevant little things like reducing paper towel use.

I know at some level it is important to understand what individual behaviors contribute to climate change so that we can better adjust our behavior in the future. I also acknowledge that there is an importance to accountability which I'm more or less dismissing here. However, I am not taking these factors fully into account because I don't think we are at this point yet. I think we are currently at the point where the fire is burning and the hose has just been turned on. In that situation, the only thing to do is point the water at the flames and figure out how to put the fire out. The discussion about who caused the fire or what can be done next time to prevent the fire from starting can wait until after the fire is out.

The interesting thing about taking up a firefighting mentality is that this almost always brings everyone together. In the face of an obvious crisis, people usually forget their differences to band together and find a way to bring an obviously chaotic situation back under control. This doesn’t seem to be happening with climate change and I think the backward-looking elements of the discussion are partly to blame. Humanity isn't fully banding together to mitigate its effects because we spend so much time sorting ourselves into opposing sides defined by an irrelevant interest in pointing the finger at the right culprit. If the climate change issue is ever going to benefit from the togetherness required for solving big problems, it will first need to change the tone of the discussion so that the blame and finger-pointing elements are put away until the smoke is clearing and the embers are cooling.